Automation is well established in the field of materials discovery and research. Over the past several years, there have been efforts to apply automation and high throughput techniques into various development labs in which automated systems have been set up to serve dedicated workflows. For example, there are a number of automated reactor systems that have been used for synthesis screening and process optimization. See, for example, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2003, 125, 4306-4317; “An Automated Approach to Process Optimization, Parameter Setting, and Robustness Testing” Organic Process R&D 2001, 5, 331-334; J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2002, 124, 15280 15285; “Automated Workstations for Parallel Synthesis” Organic Process R&D 2002, 6, 833-840; “Parallel solid-phase synthesis, screening, and encoding strategies for olefin-polymerization catalysts.” Tetrahedron 1999, 55(39), 11699-11710; “An integrated high-throughput workflow for pre-formulations: Polymorphs and salt selection studies” Pharmachem, 2003, 1(7/8); and “Application of high throughput technologies to drug substance and drug product development” Computers and Chem. Eng. 2004, 28, 943-953.
The above efforts include procedures intended to automate the formation of a library of liquid samples and films formed from such samples by using certain contact and non-contact methods to apply a spreading force to the samples. See, e.g., published U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/448,788, published Apr. 15, 2004 (Publication No. 2004/0071888); and published U.S. patent application Ser. No. 9/682,829, published Apr. 24, 2003 (Publication No. 2003/0677390).
While these examples highlight that automation has been successfully applied to dedicated workflows, there is a need for even more flexible and efficient automation systems.